


Mixed Metaphors

by Lokei



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-21
Updated: 2008-02-21
Packaged: 2017-10-19 05:00:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/197176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokei/pseuds/Lokei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Briefings are boring, but if they're not exactly on the same page, at least they're reading each other's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mixed Metaphors

Loving Jack is like football.Despite having all the mythology of the ancient world and a fair amount of the literature of the modern one at my fingertips from which to draw my allusions, this is the image to which I return. I will refrain from elaborating on just how much pain it causes me to be driven to employ a sports reference in this case—a true example of using the ridiculous to approximate the sublime—but I’m afraid it’s entirely too apt a comparison to ignore.Loving Jack is like football.

The good days, the days you live for, are the days every play works.The quarterback and the receiver are in perfect harmony, and the arching flight of each completed pass leaves you aching with its gravity-defying beauty.Loving Jack is like that.

The other 90% of the time, it’s guys on opposing sides, crashing skulls and grunting at each other.

Loving Jack is like that, too.

So sitting here in a briefing that will not end, hearing more than I ever wanted to know about some magical mineral compound that’s giving the top brass paroxysms of military joy, when my eyes meet Jack’s and the pass flies between us, I can just sit back and wonder which one of us is quarterback and which one receiver this time, in a perfect amity of boredom.It’ll be my turn next to propose the mission I want, complete with ‘meaning of life stuff,’ which means we’ll be back to the crashing and the grunting and the painful predictability of having to fight for what I find worthwhile…

But boy, are the touchdowns worth it all.

+++

Loving Daniel is like a sonnet—and that I’d even try hard enough to come up with a comparison like that is evidence enough that he’s been rubbing off on me in more than one good way.

But for a man who lives and loves words as much as my Daniel, no other simile, metaphor, analogy, what-have-you will do.Daniel is a sonnet—apparently bound by a strict set of rules governing behavior and expectations, but in reality an endless variety of complications and variations.I remember when we studied the sonnet form in high school—admittedly, because my English teacher was hot and she got this incredible look on her face when she talked about poetry that’s not entirely dissimilar to the way a certain archaeo-linguist looks when he’s cracked some dusty language on a dustier tablet.

But the point is, she said most of Shakespeare’s sonnets are structured like this: a question, a reflection, a turn in the thought of the poem or a rephrasing of the first idea, and then a conclusion that might be an answer or might just open what you thought was the answer right back up again into a whole new question.It was simultaneously really cool and really annoying.

Loving Daniel is a lot like that.Sonnets are all that meaning of life stuff he does so well—and he really does, to the point that even he uses my phrase ‘cause whaddya know, I rub off on him too—Danny and sonnets both start out asking those pesky questions about individuals and choice and feelings and dilemmas that you think you can solve easily or possibly even ignore until you really look at them, and then it turns out they’re universal anyway.Daniel sees that connection, every time.And he makes me see it, and makes Hammond see it, and hell, even makes the President and not a few other world leaders see it.

And some sonnets are only about what there is between two souls, which is the smallest and simultaneously the very biggest thing out there—and loving Daniel is that, too.Loving Daniel is that more than anything, because if he’s hieroglyphics and I’m comic strips, if I’m hockey and he’s that weird Mayan proto-basketball, no matter how you put it, when I catch his eye in this briefing from hell then I know as well as I know anywhere, that I’m willing to listen to any questions he asks because we both know the ultimate answer.

Well, I’ll listen to any questions that don’t result in the excavating of artifacts other than one graying USAF colonel named Jack O’Neill.Love the guy—but I do have my limits.


End file.
